HUMAN RHYTHM
uclouvain |
From biology to culture: Clarifying how humans categorize rhythm across the lifespan, senses, social learning and brain networks
Humans show an outstanding capacity to perceive and move to musical rhythms. These skills rely on mapping the sheer diversity of external rhythms onto a set of internal rhythm categories. However, the brain bases of rhythm categorization remain largely unknown. One view is that the underlying mechanisms are anchored in the evolutionarily oldest subcortical parts of the brain. This view is intuitive, given the universality of some musical rhythms (based on a grid of equal time intervals and their grouping in twos) and increasing evidence for the abilities to process such rhythms in non-human species. However, recent large-scale behavioral and modelling research have highlighted the vast individual and cultural diversity of musical rhythm, suggesting that rhythm categorization is a high-level function supported by a plastic network of sensory, motor, and associative brain regions, whose activity is shaped by the distribution of rhythms in the environment.
Thus, this research program aims to launch the neuroscience of rhythm categorization on a large, unprecedented scale, as a decisive way to bridge the gap between neurobiological predispositions and culture-driven plasticity developing over the course of life through social learning. This will be achieved by capitalizing on a novel approach recently developed to capture directly neural representations of rhythm categories using electrophysiological recordings combined with Representational Similarity Analysis. Specifically, this approach will allow to clarify how rhythm categorization develops over the lifespan from birth, how it is shaped by cultural experience, and how a network of brain regions shared partly by non-human species supports this plasticity. This will critically contribute to explaining the universality yet diversity of musical rhythm specific to humans, and open to clinical perspectives to probe in patients the functionality of a brain network including high-level sensorimotor and associative areas.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the grant agreement number 101228872.